Alan D
Group: Members
Posts: 3670
Joined: Aug. 2004 |
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Posted: Mar. 25 2008, 16:52 |
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I've been putting off writing something about Music of the Spheres because I found myself juggling a number of thoughts that seemed inconsistent, and I hoped the inconsistencies would resolve themselves. But they haven't, yet. So I thought I'd write a few things regardless. Maybe doing so will help me to sort a few things out.
First, and most important: I think it's a lovely album, and 'lovely' is the best word I can think of to fit it. It's bursting with melody right from the word 'go', and I don't find a single part of it dull. I think he made a very wise decision at the outset, by deciding on a structure that he knew he could control. That structure, coupled with the obvious reference to the TB theme, gives him a solid base - which surely prevented him from falling into the trap Paul McCartney did, with his overlong, overblown Standing Stone. I think MOTS is just the right length - it achieves a symphonic sense of scale at around 45 minutes, but avoids becoming too expansive and spreading itself too thinly. In fact, I'm amazed by how fast those 45 minutes go by.
But if that remains my over-riding feeling about the album, I do have a few misgivings/uncertainties. First - I'm concerned that I like it too much, and too easily. Any classical piece that approaches the stature of a symphony always taxes me on first hearing. Even if it catches my interest, it still takes me three listenings to start to feel my way into it, and even then there are huge gaps where I feel the territory is largely unexplored. This didn't happen with Music of the Spheres. I liked it very much, first time through. I picked up more detail the second time, and a bit more after that - and I'm sure that will continue in bits for a while yet; but I don't get that sense of a great unexplored territory lying ahead. I feel that MOTS is something I'll be able to return to with great pleasure a very large number of times, but I don't think it will extend me, or help me to grow.
There's one part of MOTS that I feel very uneasy about - and I feel even more uneasy because I know that for many people, this bit is a highpoint of the album. In an album which is so unfailingly 'nice', Hayley Westenra's performance of 'On My Heart' is, for me, a spoonful of sugar too many. I can stay with it for a minute or two, as it teeters on the brink of sentimentality; but then the chorus comes in towards the end, and the teetering becomes a headlong plunge into Disneyland, crocodile tears, and 'when you wish upon a star'. Maybe I'm bringing too much personal baggage to this, because I know how many people love this piece; but I really struggle to cope with its cloying sentimentality. I would love to hear a version of this sung by a soprano of more controlled power, and less sweetness - and without, oh please, without, the heavenly choir.
When I first heard Mike Oldfield (through 'Boxed' in 1979), I felt that I'd discovered someone who was writing a new kind of classical music that demanded the kind of listening that I normally gave to someone like Vaughan Williams. What was so exhilarating was that he was doing this in a new way, his own way, with a completely fresh approach to instrumentation. I think he's carried on doing these experiments right the way through to the present, producing a great range of work some of which I loved, and some of which disappointed - but it was always his unique take. With MOTS, he's at last attempted to do the Mike Oldfield 'thing' with a traditional orchestra - and yes it's lovely, and yes it's distinctively Mike Oldfield, but it does immediately make me compare what he's done with what others have done with an orchestra. Up to now he's had his own field - the Mike Oldfield instrumentation field - virtually to himself. But now he's up against the big guys, and lovely though this music is, I worry that it feels a bit lightweight. He's been the biggest fish in his own musical pool all this time. Here, in this great classical ocean, he seems smaller.
I think Sir Mustapha broadly has it right when he says that to label this as a 'classical' album is to do it no favours. It's better regarded as a Mike Oldfield album, made with an orchestra: a lovely experiment, with some thrilling moments, bringing great pleasure to lots and lots of people, me included. We've had a wide range of superbly cooked savoury dishes down the years, and now we're getting the dessert. Delicious.
I wonder what the cheese and biscuits will be like?
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... well, maybe not entirely. I completely understand the sentiment there. I think I, however, have a higher "corn syrup" tolerance when the melody is solid enough. I'm the one who sends Oldfield's most bombastic 90's efforts down in flames and melts into a puddle upon hearing the Flaming Lips' "Do You Realize??", after all...
